Yes, I cannot pass up a good red carpet. So here’s the 2012 Met Ball hit list.
Camilla Belle in Ralph Lauren
If fall’s most mystifying trend was the mullet dress, spring offers an equally mystifying take on the idea. For spring it’s all about the peplum skirt. This is one of those trends that I am skeptical I will ever be able to get on board with. I am usually one to buy into just about any and every trend. I believe firmly in the concept so eloquently played out on Leandra Medine’s blog The Man Repeller, that women dress not for men, but largely for themselves and each other, and there is an enormous amount of pleasure to be gotten from indulging in the most preposterous of trends no matter how ugly and inexplicable men might find them. When I think about fashion and getting dress, it aspires at its best to art, not to a sales pitch for my sexuality. But a girl’s got to draw the line somewhere, and the peplum may be one of the most horrid design elements I have ever seen.
The peplum skirt was certainly a presence on the spring runways…
whether at Jason Wu
If you can easily afford designer prices, hell, go for it. The clothes are generally exquisite. If you find a designer piece on an unbelievable sale, go for that too. But in terms of jumping onboard with spring’s fabulous designer trends, the fact is it’s really not necessary to shell out for the real thing. That is, after all, what fast fashion is about — the fact that trends are changing constantly, so the clothing may as well be disposable and be priced accordingly. Beyond that, however, H&M does an absolutely unbelievable job of reproducing the designer trends. At times, it can be hard to distinguish the H&M version from the real thing.
This spring season is a tough one for me. Oddly, I absolutely love it — I can barely contain my desire to own every article of clothing I see. Yet it challenges almost all of my preconceptions about what I do not like when it comes to all areas of style and aesthetics. Prabal Gurung put me in my place with regards to large doses of the color purple. Right up there with my aversion to purple, is my discomfort with anything rainbow (already put to the test yesterday in ….’s photograph). My only explanation is that both are part of the same aesthetic for me. It includes rainbows, clouds, unicorns, angels and the color purple. And “My Little Pony”, which for some reason the tweenage kids seem to be really into now in a tongue-in-cheek retro kind of way. That was once my world. Picture, if you will, a bedroom. The walls are light blue. The ceiling is covered in wallpaper that is light blue with clouds (a la Kramer vs. Kramer). From hooks in the ceiling, there hang various puffy and satin objects: a unicorn, a naked little angel figure, a cloud with a rainbow of ribbons hanging down from it. On the wall above the bed there is an enormous puffy rainbow, three feet long, emerging from a cloud. This is my bedroom, I’m going to guess maybe age 11 or so. The saccharine sweet of it is so intense it almost burns.
And yet, two of my favorite designers — Mary Katrantzou and Christopher Kane — have taken the rainbow motif to the extreme, Kane with his resort collection and Katrantzou with her spring collection. I still can’t quite envision myself walking down the street in one of Christopher Kane’s little rainbow dresses. It seems like it would make such a ridiculous spectacle. But I’m tempted. It just might happen.
Christopher Kane Resort 2012 collection via Style.com
Okay, so it isn’t really spring, but it sure as hell feels like it. And that means that women and girls everywhere seem to be obsessing about finding the perfect dress — for graduation, for a wedding, whatever it is spring means outdoor parties and celebrations and that means an excuse to buy a fabulous dress. (Personally I find it much easier to buy fabulous dresses all year round. It takes the pressure off the spring dress and the holiday dress.) So here are my two cents (which will come in the form of a few posts and therefore feel maybe more like a dime) on the perfect dress this spring.
Every fashion magazine lists a slew of trends for spring — floral, sporty, global, metallic, neons, yada, yada, yada — until it seems like you’ve covered pretty much every base imaginable and now your really not talking trends but describing every article of clothing ever designed. But for me the most compelling is prints. I’m a prints on prints kind of a person anyway, so that’s not a big change, but trends this spring have fallen perfectly into my wheelhouse, and colorful clashing outrageous prints abound. It’s going to be hard to get away with this kind of manic effusiveness again, so I say go for it.
It feels like Mary Katrantzou as fashion’s darling is the starting point for this whole prints obsession, but I suspect that’s just my personal infatuation talking (see The Most Incredible Collection This Spring – I <3 Mary Katrantzou). But wherever it came from, it seems to have spread like wild-fire. Personally, I have an aversion to purple. Almost every little girl goes through a purple phase – I sure as hell did – and in my opinion it kind of ruins the color forever. And yet Prabal Gurung took a limited palate, almost completely centered around the color purple, and came up with something awesome (in the true sense of the word) and absolutely irresistible.
Prabal Gurung Spring 2012 collection
The Mary Katrantzou for Topshop collaboration was (is — since it has yet to arrive at Topshop New York and Topshop Las Vegas) amazing. By many accounts it is the best designer x fast fashion collaboration to date. But count on London Fashion Week to remind us that there is nothing quite like a designer mainline collection, and for most of us, it will always elude our grasp. As excited as I am to receive my Mary Katrantzou for Topshop pieces in the mail, they pale in comparison to the Fall 2012 show she just put on.
At her best, Katrantzou is able to take over the top conceits and render them subtly exquisite and wearable. When she piles print upon print, I’m in heaven. But the look is certainly not for everyone. This season, she has largely restricted each look to a single color. I don’t think the line loses anything in the process, but perhaps it will gain a broader audience (customer base). Balancing the restraint she shows with her color palates, the silhouettes she uses have become more complex and more sophisticated, and as a result more intricately intertwined with the prints on the fabrics. The subjects of the prints are banal objects, I would say bordering on the absolutely ridiculous, and yet made so beautiful and refined in Katrantzou’s hands that all you see is a breathtaking work of art.
 |
 |
 |
Silver … silver … hmm … oh yeah, Silverware! Check out the spoons on the dress above left. Read the rest of this entry »
So, Mary Katrantzou for Topshop has quiety come and gone. There are a few pieces left, but it doesn’t amount to much at this point. Apparently the Bodycon dress — which is in fact the item that sold out within seconds of going on line rather than the hyped up limited edition dress which everyone predicted would be the first to go — will be coming back in stock in some quantity next week. No word yet on when. Otherwise, it’s over. No crashing website or crazy mobs. Topshop handled the whole fanfare without a whole lot of … well … fanfare.
The Bodycon dress is the one item coming back in stock. Oddly, the actual dress does not match the one in the promotion. To bad because I suspect the one shown above would be more flattering.
In anticipation of the Mary Katrantzou for Topshop launch on Friday, I am trying to brace myself for intense disappointment. Fortunately, Topshop has an answer for that — at least I hope it’s an answer and not yet another set up with too many customers and too little stock. Friday also marks the launch of Topshop’s NEWGEN designer t-shirt collection. I like the whole designer t-shirt thing. It may seem like a lot of money for a t-shirt, but looked at the other way around, it is the perfect way to grab something affordable and absolutely fabulous! Unlike the dresses I buy that then sit in the closet waiting for the right occasion, t-shirts are a great everyday wardrobe staple. A nice designer t-shirt can even be appropriate for work. Maybe not where you work, but I wouldn’t bet on that. I’m pretty sure I could figure out how to wear a t-shirt in almost every kind of a situation … ever since Sharon Stone rocked a t-shirt with a taffeta skirt (if you ask me, the all time best outfit around). Nice crisp t-shirt, a tailored charcoal suit from All Saints — you may not be able to get away with it in the most traditional business-like environment, but I would sure as hell try.
There is a Mary Katrantzou shirt among the offerings, but oddly it’s not my favorite. Shirts are £30 each. There is pretty much something for everyone, but I think the JW Anders, Meadham Kirchhoff, Peter Jensen, Emma Cook and Marios Schwab shirts are fantastic. Do you think getting five is overkill.
JW Anderson
Pictures of Mary Katrantzou’s collection for Topshop have finally been released! Yay! This is definitely a very different kind of collaboration than those from Target and H&M. Reports had stated that this would be a 14 piece collection. Now, apparently it has become a ten piece collection. I have only been able to find images of nine pieces, so I’m not sure where the last one went, but when the collection hit stores presumably there should be ten pieces. But any way you slice it, it is an extremely small and tight collection (although it is the largest of the three collections that Katrantzou has designed for Topshop to date). Perhaps most significantly, it is THE collection that seems to be driving all of spring’s major trends. Citizens of Humanity jeans, Zara, Topshop, H&M, Forever 21 — everywhere you turn, trend driven stores are all about the abundant floral prints. That is a hell of a lot of influence for a young designer. Way to go Mary! Party on!
Mary Katrantzou for Topshop, Blue Carnation T-shirt £50 and Jersey Leggings £40
Karl by Karl Lagerfeld
Is it just me, or is this whole affordable designer capsule collection thing just spinning out of control? I bet you’re getting tired of reading posts about designer collaborations. I’m getting tired of hearing of them and I am obsessed with the damn things. That suggests to me that something is clearly out of whack. Let’s take stock of the collections since the summer:
© Copyright 2012 | Art Into Life | All Rights Reserved
